RAM Mixing Question

[Saltman]

Hi all,

 

New to the forum. I had some problems with my PC the other day, and long story short I thought it was a RAM problem so I decided "Screw it" I'll just upgrade the RAM. I had 4 sticks of G.SKILL 16GB 3200MHZ DDR4 in it, and I bought 2 sticks of Crucial 32 GB 3200MHz. Come to find out the board was the problem and not the RAM. Would it be okay to stick 2 of the 16GB g.skill sticks in with the 32 GB sticks? I've always heard that mixing speeds was a bad idea but never anything about differing sizes. Also, would I be better off running the 2 sticks (64GB) or 4 sticks (32GB) if mixing sizes is a bad idea? TIA

[Crunchy Dragon]

It'll be fine.

It won't be optimal and you'll lose a small(practically negligible) amount of performance, but you won't have any issues. By default, your motherboard will match all the RAM to the slowest speed supported by all DIMMs, but you can overclock or XMP to overcome that.

 

As for running 2 vs 4 DIMMs, it's really up to you. In a dual channel motherboard, it tends to matter more that you have an even number of DIMMs moreso than making sure they're all the same capacity.